SATA disc spindown

[Ramon Hofer <ramonhofer@bluewin.ch>]

Hi all

I'd like to spin down all my sata hdds except the system drive with 
hdparm.

Therefore I uncommented the spindown_time line and set the value to 241 
which should spin down all the drives after 30 minutes.

When I put the discs to sleep manually with sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdc it 
works.
But after changing the spindown_time in /etc/hdparm.conf, rebooting the 
system and waiting for more than an hour the drives doesn't sleep.
(I checked it with sudo hdparm -C /dev/sd? and every disc is active/idle)
One drive is completely dedicated to mythtv which was idle since 
rebooting so there shouldn't be any access to the disc.

I sometimes read hdparm is only for ide drives and then I read it works 
as well with sata drives.

Do I have to put a description block for each drive separately or is the 
global spindown_time fine?

I think it would be nicer to have a 30 min timeout as standard and just 
exclude the system drive because when adding more drives they spind down 
too without adding a new block to hdparm.conf.

Can I check the access to the discs from a log?
Or maybe I should create a sudo hdparm -C /dev/sd? log which checks the 
drive states every 15 minutes or so?


Cheers
Ramon